Today's Reading
THERE ARE SOME THINGS in this life for which no amount of training can truly prepare you, you just have to experience them. Combat. Skydiving. Pregnancy. Mercy Carr found the first grueling and the second exhilarating, but the third was unsettling in ways neither of the others were. At thirty-six weeks and counting, she was far more anxious and awkward now than she ever was on the battlefield or in free fall.
Still, Mercy was approaching this nine-month assignment just as she approached any mission—with discipline and determination. Which was why on this gloomy morning at the height of Vermont's mud season, she was waddling through the woods with Elvis, the smartest dog in the world. The Malinois didn't mind the mire, but Mercy found navigating through the sludge a slog. Her mother's plaid Burberry poncho flapped around her substantial middle like a blanket on an unsaddled horse. Her boots, slick with muck, thwapped with every sticky step. Only the cashmere scarf she'd looped around her neck stayed in place.
For balance and support, she wore a bellyband over the super-stretchy maternity yoga pants that she'd been forced to wear after she outgrew her beloved cargo pants. She missed all those pockets. No backpack either, but she had Elvis, who cheerfully carried her essentials on his back in his blaze-orange dog pack—water, collapsible bowls, granola bars and doggie treats, her grandfather's Swiss Army knife, a roll of duct tape, antibacterial wipes, plastic gloves. All she had on her person was her cell phone and her wallet and thirty extra pounds, only six of which comprised actual baby. The rest she didn't even want to think about.
She consulted the GPS on her phone and looked around. The yellow birches and paper birches, striped maples and sugar maples, red oaks and pin oaks were mostly bare, stripped of all but a dusting of snow. Only the few remaining beeches held on to their leaves, their faded bronze foliage the color of tobacco stains. The hemlocks and pines provided brush notes of green between the skeletal trunks of their bare neighbors. The forest floor was a crumpled layer cake of dead leaves and needles, snatches of sodden snow, and a thick silty ooze.
Getting a cell signal up here was mostly impossible. But she could use her GPS app to help her track her locations as she moved through the thirty-acre parcel she and her husband, Troy, had purchased last autumn. They'd moved into the old Victorian manor and remodeled the kitchen and now they were putting the finishing touches on the nursery. But planning for the baby and decorating the house were not enough to keep her occupied during these long months of relative inactivity. After sustaining a couple of injuries on a case during her first trimester, she'd promised her doctor and her husband that she would take it easy—three little words that were not usually even in her vocabulary. Three little words that she loathed.
Mercy needed something to do. She amused herself by using Google Earth and her GPS app to map their acreage—trails and trees and structures and bodies of water, from the woods and the wetlands to the ponds and creeks and the old ruins and beyond. Forest mapping was an art as well as a science, and the project had been approved by her biology professor at the University of New Hampshire, so it would apply toward her degree in wildlife management. The career she'd finally decided upon after leaving the army.
And so she made her way through the woods every day, observing and documenting and getting plenty of exercise. Troy and her parents—namely her mother—were not thrilled, but when her doctor gave her the thumbs-up, they couldn't complain. At least not much. It was, after all, safer than tracking down thieves and kidnappers and murderers.
Besides, she always had Elvis with her.
These days the Belgian shepherd rarely left her side. Usually, he would dart off-trail and circle back to her, but he seemed to know that she was pregnant, and stayed close to her at all times.
It wasn't just the dog. Everyone was extremely concerned about Mercy now. "I'm not sick, I'm pregnant," she'd say again and again, but it was no use. Even though she was in top physical condition, thanks to a prenatal workout routine worthy of Serena Williams. Still, she was coddled by all.
Apparently, the only cure was childbirth. Of course she couldn't wait to meet her child, who promised to be as active in the world as in the womb. But it was also true that she couldn't wait to see all the attention presently focused on her rightfully transferred to the baby.
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